One of the major joys of writing about Japanese movies is that whenever you begin to get that tired, jaded feeling that you think you’ve seen it all and that there’s nothing left that’s ever going to set your pulse racing, you stumble across a whole previously hidden seam of movies that completely revolutionises any ideas of what Japanese cinema is. I remember getting this feeling watching the works of Hiroshi Shimizu at the 2003 Tokyo FILMeX, and I got it again at the same festival exactly one year later, during a 13-film retrospective of Tomu Uchida, which travelled to the Rotterdam Film Festival in a slimmed-down version a couple of months later. 　　In English-language film circles, not much is really generally known about Japanese cinema prior to the 1960s. Anderson and Richie’s The Japanese Film: Art and Industry is still the bible for those who want to find out more, but more recent non-academic publications are limited by the films that are available for viewing. It’s a catch-22 situation, which DVD is slowly overcoming. Yet still, outside of the work of a few major directors like Kurosawa and Ozu, recent releases have tended to stick with products from more recent years, more often than not focused around the twin poles of art and exploitation. 　　It is therefore really difficult to get any broader picture of what the industry was doing before the days of yakuza movies and Roman Porno. Yet the 1950s were the decade when the Japanese cinema had reached full maturity and cinema attendances were at a peak, the so-called Golden Age when the major companies were between them turning out around 500 films a year, all made by directors with several decades of experience behind them, at long-established studios with a large highly-trained professional team of technicians. Far from being the bastion of conservativeness that Oshima and the New Wave directors labelled it to be, I am coming to look at the decade as a vast lucky dip with some fabulous treasures still waiting to be found – such as The Outsiders, for example, an epic outdoor adventure in which an embittered Ken Takakura fights for the rights of Hokkaido’s oppressed Ainu population. 　　Tomu Uchida was one of those names I’d heard bandied about a lot, most often in conjunction with the film Earth (Tsuchi) made in 1939. A seminal piece of social-realism made by a director noted for his leftist inclinations, Earth focused on the harsh lives of a community of farmers at a time when rapid urbanisation was bleeding the countryside dry. It was a political film in that it confronted the swelling ranks of the emergent urban middle classes who made up the large bulk of cinema audiences with the plight of the rural poor, paralleling the release of John Ford’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in America around the same time in 1940. 　　Remember, long before the days of television, cinema was the only way of seeing how the other half lived, and in today’s image-saturated mass-media culture it is easy to overlook the power and immediacy of what people saw on the big screen. Uchida’s film was all the more political because it was made at the time when the lion’s share of agricultural production was being put towards Japan’s wartime expansion. Needless to say, it went bang in the face of the type of films the government was promoting at the time. 　　Earth was filmed over the course of a year with a documentarist’s attention to detail, taking in each of the seasons and focusing very much on man’s relationship with the soil. This approach of drawing out the realism and charting the passage of time through the use of the four seasons much later became a staple of the documentary films made by the collective centred around Shinsuke Ogawa, such as Magino Village – A Tale (Sennen Kizami no Hidokei: Magino-Mura Monogatari, 1987), or more recently in the documentary-styled fictional work of Naomi Kawase, specifically the films Suzaku and Hotaru. 　　Uchida’s film, by the way, is not to be confused with the German-Japanese co-production, The New Earth (Atarashii Tsuchi), directed by Mansaku Itami, the father of Tampopo director Juzo Itami. This film, released in 1941, was a nationalist propaganda work made under the instigation of Dr Arnold Fanck, the German director who sparked off the peculiar genre of the “Mountain Film” as typified by The Holy Mountain (Der Heilige Berg, recently released on DVD in the UK by Eureka). As written by Fanck, its goal was to portray “unity of the Nazi group-spirit and the racial spirit of the Japanese as opposed to the weak spirit of the democracies”, but there was conflict between the Japanese and the German creative elements throughout the production due to the way in which Fanck constantly misrepresented elements of Japanese culture in service of the film’s higher propagandist purpose (The Last Samurai, anyone?). Released overseas at the time as The Daughter of the Samurai, one of the first co-productions Japan ever made with the West thus ended up a classic textbook example of orientalist filmmaking. 　　Much of what has been written about Uchida’s career in the English language – basically in Anderson and Richie’s book – has focused on his pre-war career. But as the FILMeX retrospective clearly demonstrated, this was only half of the story. In 1945, the left-leaning director travelled to the formerly Japanese-occupied area of Manchuria in China to join the Manchuria Film Association, or Man’ei, and was not to come back until 1953. Upon his return he continued for almost two decades to produce a wide range of films that fit into every genre conceivable, from traditional kabuki adaptations to melodrama and yakuza movies. 　　The diversity of his oeuvre therefore means that getting a grip on what elements typify an Uchida picture is a difficult task, but on the evidence of The Outsiders, one of the original program that tellingly did not go over to the Rotterdam festival, perhaps it is fruitful to turn once again to the parallel with John Ford. The film’s mixture of heroic action, making full use of one of the top macho icons of its day, an expansive sense of location, masterful use of colour and composition and a focus on social injustice meted out on large sectors of the nation’s indigenous people had me thinking in terms of The Searchers. In what seems like another unlikely case of synchronicity, Ford’s film was released just two years previously in 1956. 　　The Outsiders is something of a revelation. It certainly looks nothing like what you’d expect from a Japanese movie made around the mid-50s, which is perhaps the reason why it is completely unknown outside of Japan. Opening with a lengthy pan across the barren mountaintops of Hokkaido, Uchida’s third film in colour, after the two parts of the jidai-geki Daibosatsu Pass (Daibosatsutoge, 1957/58) is an undeniably exhilarating visual experience, making full use of the Toeiscope widescreen format to capture Japan’s northernmost territory in all its rugged beauty. It also is of particular interest for drawing attention to the destruction of the culture and the discrimination against the indigenous Ainu people, a dwindling race faced with danger of extinction since the Japanese nation began its concerted push northwards with the government extending administration over all parts of the landmass in 1868. 　　Screen legend Ken Takakura is Ishitaro Kazamori, known as Byakki “the Phoenix” by the local Ainu population, as he whisks from village to village on horseback delivering supplies and educational books to the locals, an outcast Robin Hood character working for the future of his people. But Byakki’s rough methods aren’t to everyone’s tastes. Money has been going missing from the funds raised by the chairman of the Ainu Society, Dr. Ike (Kitazawa), a well-meaning “shamo” (non-Ainu) who has dedicated much of his life to researching the history and culture of Japan’s aboriginal people. 　　When Dr Ike brings a young landscape painter Yoshiko Saeki (Kagawa) from Tokyo with him on his field trips to sketch the local landscapes, there is initially resentment of another outsider treating the local populations as her own pet project. But Yoshiko soon befriends Mitsu (Fujisato), an Ainu girl who was jilted years ago on the eve of the holy Bekanbe Festival by her “shamo” lover who couldn’t go through with the stigma of marrying into this ostracised class. Mitsu may also hold the key to Byakki’s whereabouts. 　　Meanwhile, as the next Bekanbe Festival approaches, tension is growing between the Ainu and the Japanese settlers in the coastal town of Nanbetsu due to Byakki’s increasingly unruly antics. One local who steadfastly refuses to pitch in to Dr. Ike’s project is Oiwa (Mikuni), who runs the local fishery with his old father (Susukida), and runs a strict policy of not hiring any Ainu workers. Oiwa bears Byakki a particular enmity, because Byakki knows that Oiwa is living in denial, masquerading as a “shamo” and keeping his real Ainu ancestry well hidden. But Oiwa also knows a few secrets about Byakki. 　　Hokkaido is in many ways Japan’s northernmost frontier, its own equivalent to the Wild West, and The Outsiders, though based on the novel Mori to Mizuumi no Matsuri by Taijun Takeda, most clearly resembles an American western, a gripping action film letting forth a righteous cry against social injustice against the indigenous population and unfolding against an epic landscape. Such genre appropriations can’t be coincidental. As could be seen as early back as Uchida’s own 1933 silent, The Police Officer (Keisatsukan), which also played at FILMeX, Japanese filmmakers were certainly not above borrowing heavily from typically American staples such as the cops-and-robbers film. I can’t say whether Uchida consciously modelled his film on the western, but the crucial fact about The Outsiders is that the story makes sense and works in its own right, rather than just being noteworthy as a cross-cultural hybrid curio. 　　The main drawing point is of course Hokkaido itself, shot beautifully by cinematographer Shoe Nishikawa, picking out the autumnal russet-tinged hues of the majestic countryside of lakes, plains and woods, as the camera glides and tracks through a series of mainly exterior locations. But aside from this vibrant use of colour, also used to great effect in the matsuri (festival) scenes and the coloured fabrics of the traditional costumes, The Outsiders is also unique for revealing a facet of Japanese culture almost completely disregarded in its cinema. Bold, beautiful, and packing a powerful dramatic punch, there is little else quite like it. We can only hope that some adventurous DVD company will pick it up soon, because this is a film that could change people’s perceptions and prejudices about Japanese film for good. from midnighteye

One of the major joys of writing about Japanese movies is that whenever you begin to get that tired, jaded feeling that you think you’ve seen it all and that there’s nothing left that’s ever going to set your pulse racing, you stumble across a whole previously hidden seam of movies that completely revolutionises any ideas of what Japanese cinema is. I remember getting this feeling watching the works of Hiroshi Shimizu at the 2003 Tokyo FILMeX, and I got it again at the same festival exactly one year later, during a 13-film retrospective of Tomu Uchida, which travelled to the Rotterdam Film Festival in a slimmed-down version a couple of months later. 　　In English-language film circles, not much is really generally known about Japanese cinema prior to the 1960s. Anderson and Richie’s The Japanese Film: Art and Industry is still the bible for those who want to find out more, but more recent non-academic publications are limited by the films that are available for viewing. It’s a catch-22 situation, which DVD is slowly overcoming. Yet still, outside of the work of a few major directors like Kurosawa and Ozu, recent releases have tended to stick with products from more recent years, more often than not focused around the twin poles of art and exploitation. 　　It is therefore really difficult to get any broader picture of what the industry was doing before the days of yakuza movies and Roman Porno. Yet the 1950s were the decade when the Japanese cinema had reached full maturity and cinema attendances were at a peak, the so-called Golden Age when the major companies were between them turning out around 500 films a year, all made by directors with several decades of experience behind them, at long-established studios with a large highly-trained professional team of technicians. Far from being the bastion of conservativeness that Oshima and the New Wave directors labelled it to be, I am coming to look at the decade as a vast lucky dip with some fabulous treasures still waiting to be found – such as The Outsiders, for example, an epic outdoor adventure in which an embittered Ken Takakura fights for the rights of Hokkaido’s oppressed Ainu population. 　　Tomu Uchida was one of those names I’d heard bandied about a lot, most often in conjunction with the film Earth (Tsuchi) made in 1939. A seminal piece of social-realism made by a director noted for his leftist inclinations, Earth focused on the harsh lives of a community of farmers at a time when rapid urbanisation was bleeding the countryside dry. It was a political film in that it confronted the swelling ranks of the emergent urban middle classes who made up the large bulk of cinema audiences with the plight of the rural poor, paralleling the release of John Ford’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in America around the same time in 1940. 　　Remember, long before the days of television, cinema was the only way of seeing how the other half lived, and in today’s image-saturated mass-media culture it is easy to overlook the power and immediacy of what people saw on the big screen. Uchida’s film was all the more political because it was made at the time when the lion’s share of agricultural production was being put towards Japan’s wartime expansion. Needless to say, it went bang in the face of the type of films the government was promoting at the time. 　　Earth was filmed over the course of a year with a documentarist’s attention to detail, taking in each of the seasons and focusing very much on man’s relationship with the soil. This approach of drawing out the realism and charting the passage of time through the use of the four seasons much later became a staple of the documentary films made by the collective centred around Shinsuke Ogawa, such as Magino Village – A Tale (Sennen Kizami no Hidokei: Magino-Mura Monogatari, 1987), or more recently in the documentary-styled fictional work of Naomi Kawase, specifically the films Suzaku and Hotaru. 　　Uchida’s film, by the way, is not to be confused with the German-Japanese co-production, The New Earth (Atarashii Tsuchi), directed by Mansaku Itami, the father of Tampopo director Juzo Itami. This film, released in 1941, was a nationalist propaganda work made under the instigation of Dr Arnold Fanck, the German director who sparked off the peculiar genre of the “Mountain Film” as typified by The Holy Mountain (Der Heilige Berg, recently released on DVD in the UK by Eureka). As written by Fanck, its goal was to portray “unity of the Nazi group-spirit and the racial spirit of the Japanese as opposed to the weak spirit of the democracies”, but there was conflict between the Japanese and the German creative elements throughout the production due to the way in which Fanck constantly misrepresented elements of Japanese culture in service of the film’s higher propagandist purpose (The Last Samurai, anyone?). Released overseas at the time as The Daughter of the Samurai, one of the first co-productions Japan ever made with the West thus ended up a classic textbook example of orientalist filmmaking. 　　Much of what has been written about Uchida’s career in the English language – basically in Anderson and Richie’s book – has focused on his pre-war career. But as the FILMeX retrospective clearly demonstrated, this was only half of the story. In 1945, the left-leaning director travelled to the formerly Japanese-occupied area of Manchuria in China to join the Manchuria Film Association, or Man’ei, and was not to come back until 1953. Upon his return he continued for almost two decades to produce a wide range of films that fit into every genre conceivable, from traditional kabuki adaptations to melodrama and yakuza movies. 　　The diversity of his oeuvre therefore means that getting a grip on what elements typify an Uchida picture is a difficult task, but on the evidence of The Outsiders, one of the original program that tellingly did not go over to the Rotterdam festival, perhaps it is fruitful to turn once again to the parallel with John Ford. The film’s mixture of heroic action, making full use of one of the top macho icons of its day, an expansive sense of location, masterful use of colour and composition and a focus on social injustice meted out on large sectors of the nation’s indigenous people had me thinking in terms of The Searchers. In what seems like another unlikely case of synchronicity, Ford’s film was released just two years previously in 1956. 　　The Outsiders is something of a revelation. It certainly looks nothing like what you’d expect from a Japanese movie made around the mid-50s, which is perhaps the reason why it is completely unknown outside of Japan. Opening with a lengthy pan across the barren mountaintops of Hokkaido, Uchida’s third film in colour, after the two parts of the jidai-geki Daibosatsu Pass (Daibosatsutoge, 1957/58) is an undeniably exhilarating visual experience, making full use of the Toeiscope widescreen format to capture Japan’s northernmost territory in all its rugged beauty. It also is of particular interest for drawing attention to the destruction of the culture and the discrimination against the indigenous Ainu people, a dwindling race faced with danger of extinction since the Japanese nation began its concerted push northwards with the government extending administration over all parts of the landmass in 1868. 　　Screen legend Ken Takakura is Ishitaro Kazamori, known as Byakki “the Phoenix” by the local Ainu population, as he whisks from village to village on horseback delivering supplies and educational books to the locals, an outcast Robin Hood character working for the future of his people. But Byakki’s rough methods aren’t to everyone’s tastes. Money has been going missing from the funds raised by the chairman of the Ainu Society, Dr. Ike (Kitazawa), a well-meaning “shamo” (non-Ainu) who has dedicated much of his life to researching the history and culture of Japan’s aboriginal people. 　　When Dr Ike brings a young landscape painter Yoshiko Saeki (Kagawa) from Tokyo with him on his field trips to sketch the local landscapes, there is initially resentment of another outsider treating the local populations as her own pet project. But Yoshiko soon befriends Mitsu (Fujisato), an Ainu girl who was jilted years ago on the eve of the holy Bekanbe Festival by her “shamo” lover who couldn’t go through with the stigma of marrying into this ostracised class. Mitsu may also hold the key to Byakki’s whereabouts. 　　Meanwhile, as the next Bekanbe Festival approaches, tension is growing between the Ainu and the Japanese settlers in the coastal town of Nanbetsu due to Byakki’s increasingly unruly antics. One local who steadfastly refuses to pitch in to Dr. Ike’s project is Oiwa (Mikuni), who runs the local fishery with his old father (Susukida), and runs a strict policy of not hiring any Ainu workers. Oiwa bears Byakki a particular enmity, because Byakki knows that Oiwa is living in denial, masquerading as a “shamo” and keeping his real Ainu ancestry well hidden. But Oiwa also knows a few secrets about Byakki. 　　Hokkaido is in many ways Japan’s northernmost frontier, its own equivalent to the Wild West, and The Outsiders, though based on the novel Mori to Mizuumi no Matsuri by Taijun Takeda, most clearly resembles an American western, a gripping action film letting forth a righteous cry against social injustice against the indigenous population and unfolding against an epic landscape. Such genre appropriations can’t be coincidental. As could be seen as early back as Uchida’s own 1933 silent, The Police Officer (Keisatsukan), which also played at FILMeX, Japanese filmmakers were certainly not above borrowing heavily from typically American staples such as the cops-and-robbers film. I can’t say whether Uchida consciously modelled his film on the western, but the crucial fact about The Outsiders is that the story makes sense and works in its own right, rather than just being noteworthy as a cross-cultural hybrid curio. 　　The main drawing point is of course Hokkaido itself, shot beautifully by cinematographer Shoe Nishikawa, picking out the autumnal russet-tinged hues of the majestic countryside of lakes, plains and woods, as the camera glides and tracks through a series of mainly exterior locations. But aside from this vibrant use of colour, also used to great effect in the matsuri (festival) scenes and the coloured fabrics of the traditional costumes, The Outsiders is also unique for revealing a facet of Japanese culture almost completely disregarded in its cinema. Bold, beautiful, and packing a powerful dramatic punch, there is little else quite like it. We can only hope that some adventurous DVD company will pick it up soon, because this is a film that could change people’s perceptions and prejudices about Japanese film for good. from midnighteye

To this day it is considered the primordial cell of modern architecture and design - the Bauhaus. But "Bauhaus" doesn't just mean the cubic white house with flat roof, the steel pipe chair, or the Bauhaus lamp. The Bauhaus was also an educational center which serves as a model even today. World-renowned artists like Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe taught there. The film draws a picture of this singular institution of modernism - from revolutionary beginnings after the end of World War I to disintegration and emigration, covering subsequent careers as well as the involvement of some Bauhaus members in national socialist Germany. These episodes are remembered by former Bauhaus students of both sexes, most of them being featured through archival footage. This comprehensive critical account of the artistic and political aims of Bauhaus in a film portrait gives insight into the essence of Bauhaus principles, the conflicts that lead to relocation from Weimar to Dessau, the disbanding of the school during the Nazi era, the construction work in the young state of Israel, and the development of the Bauhaus myth in the USA.

在藏语中，该地区被称为''rgyal-thang''。传说喜马拉雅山脉地下有一个神统治、主宰全人类的神秘王国：香格-{里}--拉。从1922年到 1949年，美国植物学家、地理学者和人类学家约瑟夫·洛克（Joseph Rock，1884－1962）走遍了中国的大西南。他在1928年6月13日开始的一次从四川木-{里}-到西藏亚丁的探险穿越活动因为极富传奇色彩而被美国《国家地理》杂志以探险日记的形式发表，从而引起了学术界的巨大反响。英国小说家詹姆斯·希尔顿以此为背景创作了长篇小说《消失的地平线》，作者在小说中说中国某一处地方就是传说中的香格-{里}-拉。小说极为畅销。很多人以此书寻找香格-{里}-拉。 　　在藏族文化中有“香拔拉”（''Sham-bha-la''，梵文：“持乐世界”）的传说，据说也是处于喜马拉雅山的神秘土地，可能是西方人的“香格-{里}-拉”神话的来源。 　　仍然，中国内外的藏学家都认为，“香格里拉”这个名字和藏族文化毫无关系，仅仅是为了吸引西方游客而杜撰出来的。 　　示巴女王(Makeda, Queen of Sheba)是公元前非洲东部埃塞俄比亚的女王。她在非洲的势力，最强的时候覆盖整个东非。根据《旧约圣经》列王纪上第10章、《古兰经》和其他历史资料的记载，她因为仰慕当时以色列国王所罗门的才华与智慧，不惜紓尊降贵，前往以色列向所罗门提亲。而所罗门王也因此与她犯了姦淫罪(因为他已有妻室)，而被上帝所遗弃，并展开了以色列王国衰落的序幕。示巴女王被以色列人逐回埃塞俄比亚之时，据说已怀有所罗门王的骨肉。而出奇地埃塞俄比亚当地的语言亦与古希伯来语十分近似。此外，存放於耶路撒冷圣殿的约柜在罗马帝国军队屠城之后神秘失踪，据闻就是当年所罗门王在埃塞俄比亚的遗裔把约柜秘密从耶路撒冷运到埃塞俄比亚收藏。这些片断的正史、野史，都或多或少证实了示巴女王当年和所罗门王的关係非比寻常。亦有人凭着《雅歌》第一章第5节的一句，而认为《雅歌》是所罗门王与示巴女王之间的情话。 　　亚瑟王(King Arthur)是英格兰传说中的国王，圆桌骑士团的首领，一位近乎神话般的传奇人物。他是罗马帝国瓦解之后，率领圆桌骑士团统一了不列颠群岛，被后人尊称为亚瑟王。关於亚瑟王的传奇故事，最初如何诞生，源自何处，皆无从查考。究竟亚瑟王是不是以某位历史人物作为基础塑造出来的虚构角色也不得而知。 　　西元800年左右，威尔斯的修士撰写了一本《布灵顿人的历史》，书中首次记载「亚瑟」这个名字，描述他领导威尔斯人抵抗从泰晤士河中游入侵的萨克森人。 　　在希腊神话中，金羊毛是一只会飞、会说话的名叫克里索姆勒斯的公羊的毛。赫耳墨斯将克里索姆勒斯送给色萨利的涅斐勒，让她用这只公羊来运送她的两个孩子海勒和菲利塞斯，来让逃离伊诺的毒手。克里索姆勒斯背着两个孩子向东飞，后来海勒落入海中，而菲利塞斯则安全地到达了科尔喀斯（相当于今天的格鲁吉亚）。菲利塞斯将克里索姆勒斯牺牲给宙斯，把它的羊毛送给了科尔喀斯的国王埃厄忒斯。 　　阿格诺特英雄们取金羊毛的故事发生在此后：当时在科尔喀斯的国王埃厄忒斯据说是太阳神赫利俄斯的儿子和美狄亚的父亲。伊阿宋和其他阿格诺特英雄们企图盗取金羊毛来保证伊阿宋获得他的遗产。最后在美狄亚的帮助下他们克服重重困难获取了金羊毛。美狄亚与伊阿宋结婚。 　　古代作家如斯特拉博、亚壁等对金羊毛的叙述与上述故事有些差别。金羊毛的故事很可能有一定的历史背景。今天的考古发现证明在前三千前两千年时今天的格鲁吉亚地区的冶金技巧已经达到了很高的水平了。尤其金的加工非常精巧。此外当时当地还有许多牧羊的部落。这些文化成就很可能是金羊毛的故事的背景。

自二十世纪八十年代起，我们就听说，在亚马孙雨林，每年都有比利时面积大小的区域遭到破坏。那里的每一棵树都是不可替代的，而每一颗树的消失，都会导致许多难以想象的植物和动物走向死亡。不过若是以这种速度发展，那么现在亚马孙雨林应该完全消失了…但是87%的雨林地区仍然完好无损。我们全都被骗了吗？这部纪录片将带着这个问题以及之前从未提出的其他问题，解开萦绕在亚马孙雨林周围的一些谜团。

1943年夏天，德国法西斯占领下的法国与西班牙国界线不远处乡镇，年老的雕塑家马克•克洛斯觉得自己的生命和艺术似乎已经走到了尽头。一天，西班牙难民梅尔赛从集中营中逃至该镇，马克夫妇收留了她。马克把年轻漂亮的梅尔赛看作缪斯，认为能带给他灵感与启发，而梅尔赛也同意做他的模特。期间，梅尔赛、马克还帮助过抵抗运动分子… 　　战争快结束了，雕塑作品也完成了，马克在送走梅尔赛后选择了自我了结……

Eugene and Rick are two struggling artists who share apartment. However, Rick has problems with that, because Eugene is obsessed with pulp fiction comic books and has nightmares because of that. However, Rick soon finds that those nightmares could be excellent material for his own comic books.

Eugene and Rick are two struggling artists who share apartment. However, Rick has problems with that, because Eugene is obsessed with pulp fiction comic books and has nightmares because of that. However, Rick soon finds that those nightmares could be excellent material for his own comic books.

骁勇善战的秦朝大将军蒙毅，受秦始皇所命，负责护送朝鲜公主玉漱入秦为妃，路上竟遭丞相赵高暗中指使的叛军伏击，蒙毅为保护玉漱公主，二人紧握着手随战车堕入万丈瀑布。同一个梦境，已缠绕考古学家杰克 （ 成龙 饰）多年，梦中容颜脱俗的白衣女子——玉漱公主 （金喜善饰），更使他神魂颠倒，越发令他对秦朝古物着迷。一天，杰克的好友，热心钻研超自然能量，誓要名留青史的科学家威廉 （ 梁家辉 饰）又带来了新发现，他邀请杰克一同前往印度参与研究神秘漂浮力量。在帝沙的圣殿中，信众膜拜悬于半空的灵棺，二人看得目瞪口呆，威廉斗胆摘下祭坛上的宝石，灵棺立即失去浮力堕地粉碎。杰克与威廉被守墓侍卫与信众穷追，二人分头逃命，失魂落魄的杰克遇到了印度少女莎曼纱，莎曼纱带他到高僧师父处暂避，高僧感应到杰克被一段前世缘分困扰。杰克急于解开梦境之谜，决定离开莎曼纱回中国，到前秦帝都西安。杰克在西安秦俑博物馆重遇大难不死的威廉，他兴奋地向杰克透露，发现灵棺宝石可抵御地心引力，遂将浮力宝石据为己有，威廉更投向假借学术盗墓走私的古先生，依附对方的财力，继续进行研究，杰克痛斥威廉自私的行径；一对曾出身入死的好友因信念各异决裂。杰克乘直升机到郦山上空，冒险跳入峡谷中的瀑布，情景一如梦境；另一方面威廉一直借助高科技仪器尾随跟踪，二人同时闯进一条通往悬浮天宫的隧道，梦寐以求的玉漱公主，活生生的出现在杰克眼前，守候了数千年的玉漱，终于等到了，信守承诺的蒙毅将军回来找她。此时，古先生竟以武力接管悬浮天宫，要当长生不老的皇帝。着了魔的威廉在混乱间撬出机关上的宝石，天宫顿时失去浮力，水银从空中直坠而下，水银涌出。威廉在被水银吞噬时拜托杰克帮他继续完成研究，临死交给杰克一块矿石。而玉漱知道杰克不是苦苦等待的蒙毅时决定继续等蒙毅回来。古先生则登上天宫要取长生不老药，但被南宫彦拉下一起掉入万丈深渊，古先生的长生不老梦破碎。杰克借助还未完全消失的浮力穿过隧道弹出洞外，掉入峡谷深水潭中。当他苏醒过来，发现被水流冲到峡谷鹅卵石滩上。六个月后，杰克写了一本书《神话》。